Over the last decade, there has been a substantial increase in the use and deployment of wireless client devices, from dual-mode smartphones to tablets capable of operating in accordance with a particular Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standard. With “wireless” becoming the de-facto medium for connectivity among users, it has become increasingly important for network systems to intelligently manage connections.
In some environments, client devices may attempt to associate with an access point by transmitting a probe request. Traditionally, a threshold signal-to-noise ratio is manually preset for the access point and/or the wireless network. Probe requests that fall below this manually preset threshold signal-to-noise ratio are ignored by the corresponding access point. Although this threshold signal-to-noise ratio allows the access points and wireless network to ignore probe requests from client devices, this manually set threshold does not take into account dynamic environmental variables.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.